Campus may be deserted, but Scholarly Communication is working hard this summer to wrap up projects (and start some new ones) before the fall semester. Here are some of the things we’re looking forward to this summer:

Video training modules: Starting with some of our most frequently asked questions, we will be creating short explanatory modules that can be watched individually or linked together to create a training program for a system, concept, or policy.

Open Scholarship expansion: Our website, openscholarship.indiana.edu will be undergoing some changes to better reflect the work we are doing and provide some more content for our patrons. You can expect a new and improved workflow for depositing data into IUScholarWorks as well as information on creating and adopting Open Educational Resources.

Crossref Cited-by: We are exploring the possibility of participating in the Cited-by service, which would enable authors and readers who use our journal programs to discover who is citing the articles we publish.

Journal metrics: This summer we are working on a plan to share journal usage data with editorial teams. We hope to have a plan and template in place by September so that we can launch the service in fall.

If you have questions or would like to propose a project to the Scholarly Communication department, don’t hesitate to reach out by email (iusw@indiana.edu) or tweet us @iulibraries

Through the Office of Scholarly Publishing (OSP), a partnership between the IU Libraries and the Indiana University Press, readers everywhere have access to 30+ scholarly journals and scholarly publications free of charge. One of these journals is The Hoosier Science Teacher.

The Hoosier Science Teacheraims to “provide science educators in Pre-K-12 classrooms, informal education, home schools, and college classrooms with ideas and resources for teaching science…[and publish] content that may help support effective teaching of science and professional development for science educators.” First published in 1975 by The Hoosier Association of Science Teachers, Inc. (HASTI), The Hoosier Science Teacher published regularly in print until 2014. In 2017, publication of the Teacher resumed electronically. All of the journal’s content is immediately accessible, as open access is core to its mission. The journal’s Managing Editor, Matthew J. Benus, is an Assistant Professor of Science Education in the IU Northwest School of Education and a Think Tank & Strategic Consultant for Science & Learning.

Published biannually, the most recent volume of the journal Volume 40 Issue 1 (2018) contains 7 articles covering a variety of topics from lessons and demonstrations and instructional insight to curriculum and learning environments. One of the articles in the current issue is entitled “How Scientists are Portrayed in NSTA Recommends Books” and is authored by Kevin D. Finson and Cecile Arquette of Bradley University and Donna Farland-Smith of The Ohio State University. Finson, Arquette, and Smith argue that while “there was much consistency in how scientists were portrayed in the books across the three years…there were also issues with appropriate numbers of representations of minorities, women, and age of scientists.”

The authors focus on how depictions of scientists in school books affect children’s “perceptions of scientists,” as such perceptions impact students’ “understanding about where scientists work and what they do,” students’ attitudes towards science, as well as students’ success in science learning. While determining exactly how students develop their view of scientists is not easy, they find that media sources have the largest influence or impact. Stereotypes of scientists as older, white males in children’s literature has implications for children that do not identify with these portrayals. Such portrayals can affect students’ “formation of science identity,” which affects “one’s perception that he/she can be a successful investigator in science contexts and is viewed by others as being competent in science.”

Seeing as depictions of scientists in school books have major impacts on students’ interactions with and views of the field of science, tackling the issue of stereotypical depictions is a must. The authors suggest that one way to address this issue is through “the use of science trade books and picture books in instruction…[teacher-planned] student-centered activities that give [students] opportunities to explore their world and encourage them to think of themselves as scientists.”

The Hoosier Science Teacher’s commitment to open access and immediate availability makes it an immediately accessible and useful resource for teachers. According to Education Week Teacher, educators around the United States spend more than $1 billion dollars a year out-of-pocket on school supplies and resources for their students. This is particularly troubling for schools serving lower-income neighborhoods where, according to NPR, “teachers in high-poverty schools often find themselves digging even deeper into their own pockets.” Access to publications like The Hoosier Science Teacher may help educators to alleviate some of the out-of-pocket costs that they encounter when trying to access needed resources and literature on experimental approaches for their students and their teaching.

The IU Libraries is committed to diverse collections and perspectives, as the Libraries Diversity Strategic Plan notes that “diversity is… essential to the intellectual vitality of the university.” The Scholarly Communication department shares this commitment and aims to highlight IU’s diversity through our journal publishing program and through supporting publications like The Hoosier Science Teacher.

Congratulations to Jenny Hoops, Scholarly Communication Department Student Assistant, on winning the IUB Libraries Student Employee Recognition Award! The purpose of the award is to recognize student employees who demonstrate outstanding performance and make exceptional contributions toward the achievement of the department’s goals and objectives.

In my nomination of Jenny, I wrote the following:

Jenny has exceeded the expectations for her position, furthering the IU Libraries strategic goals and enabling the Scholarly Communication Department to successfully operationalize several key services….Her creativity and ability to problem solve independently have been assets for our team and for the library.

We’re thankful for Jenny’s initiative and excellent work over the last year and we’re thrilled that her work has been recognized through this important award. Jenny and three other recipients of the award will receive certificates and $100 cash awards.

This week, the Scholarly Communication Department has been hard at work preparing for the upgrade to our new publishing platform, Open Journals Systems 3 (OJS 3). Our priorities have included providing outreach for our journal editors and managers, integrating IU branding and accessibility information, and creating a consistent design for the overall website while allowing each journal to maintain a unique aesthetic.

The department offered three training sessions for journal managers and editors over the course of last week. These sessions highlighted the differences between the OJS 2 and OJS 3, emphasizing the streamlined process of submission management and the various technological improvements.

Attendees were also able to see OJS 3 in action for the first time, as the training included a demo of the editorial workflow and a general overview of settings and features. While one of these workshops was available via Zoom in order to access editors not able to travel to IU, the two in-person sessions will include a series of hands-on activities in a test space of OJS 3.

For those editorial teams unable to attend one of the training sessions, the following resources will be of interest:

On April 5, we will be enacting a freeze on all of our journal content in order to facilitate final implementation of OJS 3. Users will be unable to submit new articles, engage in any editorial activity, or publish any issues during these four days, but articles will still be accessible for the general public. By April 9, OJS 3 will go live, and full functionality of both journal websites and the editorial workflow will be reinstated. If you have any questions about this timeline, training sessions, or OJS 3 generally, contact iusw@indiana.edu.

Both faculty and staff attended with the symposium, with representatives from the Kelley School of Business, the School of Education, UITS, the Office of Financial Literacy, and the Office of the Vice President for Diversity, Equity, and Multicultural Affairs present. By the end of the day, at least one faculty member had switched from traditional course content to an affordable, digital eText! We’ve also already met with one faculty member interested in student-created OER and plan to have several follow up conversations in the coming months.

Participants chose one of two morning workshops: “Making Open Textbooks and Other Interactive Learning Activities with Pressbooks” with Steel Wagstaff or “Supporting Campus and Course-Level Adoption of Open Course Content” with Carrie Nelson and Kris Olds. These workshops were informative and informal, shaped by participants’ questions and centered on hands on application.

In Kris and Carrie’s session, we discussed the basics of open/ affordable and covered Creative Commons licensing, which then allowed us to have a more in-depth conversation about the process/ funding needed to create OER, governance and course material selection, student outreach, and the political economy of OER. Kris and Carrie also shared successful strategies for raising awareness about OER on their campus, which several participants felt was the most pressing barrier to more systematic adoption.

Robert McDonald, Associate Dean for Research and Technology Strategies, kicked off the afternoon panel with contextual information about the price of course materials at IUB and how these costs impact students. The panel then opened with an overview of current initiatives at IU Bloomington, presented by Michele Kelmer and Michael Regoli. The panel transitioned to presentations from our UW-Madison guest experts. Each of the guest’s presentations demonstrated that UW-Madison is engaging in innovative work around Open Educational Resource (OER) creation and community building.

I was inspired by several parts of the panel, but there are two slides I’d like to highlight here as essential and foundational for shaping the Office of Scholarly Publishing’s outreach at IU Bloomington.

These points were both encouraging and motivating to me. The Scholarly Communication Department is invested in instructor agency and autonomy, student access, and building local expertise here at IUB. We hope to continue to find champions and enthusiasts that can partner with us to make these goals possible.

There were several goals for symposium: to build community around course material issues, to connect instructors and relevant staff from key offices on campus, to raise awareness about the spectrum of existing affordable course material work happening at IU Bloomington, and to guide the future of Office of Scholarly Publishing services. We know the conversation doesn’t end here! We look forward to continuing to work with instructors on affordable and open course material creation and adoption. We also hope to partner with librarians and instructors within the IU system, Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA), and Unizin.

To apply for an information literacy grant to redesign your course around student-created OER and open pedagogy, visit the Teaching and Learning site: https://libraries.indiana.edu/course-grants (proposals due Monday, April 9)

IU Libraries are new members of the ACRL Diversity Alliance and have developed a Diversity Resident Program modeled on successful programs managed at other Diversity Alliance institutions. The IU program aims to increase the inclusion and diversity of librarians at our institution as evinced in our Diversity Strategic Plan and to further the growth and development of academic librarians at Indiana University. Read the full program description here.

Founded in 2012 by Indiana University Provost Lauren Robel, the Office of Scholarly Publishing (OSP) is a collaboration between IU Press and the scholarly publishing activities at IU Libraries aimed at furthering the enterprise of scholarly publishing at IU and beyond. Within the OSP, IU Press members provide invaluable expertise in journal production, copyediting, and marketing, alongside IU Libraries representatives, who provide consultation on intellectual property matters, digital preservation of scholarly research, public outreach for publishing initiatives across campus, and encourage the utilization of open access publishing models. The Office of Scholarly Publishing serves as an essential venue for the publishing activities of faculty, students, and staff of Indiana University.

With the current migration to the latest Open Journal Systems (OJS) 3 update—the online journals hosting platform for IUScholarWorks and IU Press journals—we continue to receive questions about the Office of Scholarly Publishing and the services it provides. We hope to clarify these below, as well as offer information to those who are interested in the suite of publishing services available to OSP journals and partners.

What kind of content does the Office of Scholarly Publishing handle?

The Office of Scholarly Publishing primarily deals with open access journal content, but OSP representatives are available to consult with IU faculty and staff about the publication of other kinds of scholarly materials. Last fall, the OSP helped Kelley School of Business instructors create four different eTexts for their courses using the PressBooks platform, for example. Anyone affiliated with IU that is interested in open access publishing is encouraged to contact the OSP to discuss their project in more detail.

What is the difference between IU Open Journals and Office of Scholarly Publishing journals?

Both IU Open Journals and OSP journals utilize Open Journal Systems, an online journal publishing platform developed by the Public Knowledge Project. The IU Open Journals program offers a digital publishing platform for any editorial team associated with Indiana University. There are minimal restrictions to becoming an IU Open Journal as only an affiliation with IU and a regular publication schedule are necessary. Peer review is not required, and pieces of work not often found in academic journals—such as memos or experimental art/poetry—can find a place of publication with this program. Our IU Open Journal service is an excellent place for any serial publication, including more non-traditional forms of scholarship, to receive support and hosting in order to make publication possible.

In contrast, Office of Scholarly Publishing journals are a select set of journals that are more academically rigorous, usually exclusively faculty peer-reviewed and faculty-authored publications. The OSP will assess journal candidates to determine if a new journal is a potential OSP journal. If it is, it will be supported by the OSP while IU Open Journals will receive support from IUScholarWorks and the Scholarly Communication Department at IU Libraries.

What services does the Office of Scholarly Publishing offer?

The Office of Scholarly Publishing offers assistance with new journal setup, editorial team education for journal workflow and website management, technical support with Open Journal Systems (OJS) software, increased user access and discoverability thorough indexing and metrics, and digital preservation of online content. OSP brokers copyediting, typesetting, and on-demand printing services and its staff are able to consult with editorial teams on marketing and design needs.

I’m in interested in starting a new publication with Indiana University. How do I start this process?

Contact iusw@indiana.edu to start set-up for a potential new journal. We will work with you to figure out whether or not your publication should be supported by IU Open Journals or the Office of Scholarly Publishing, and then provide you with outreach and technical support for Open Journal Systems.

Indiana University Bloomington undergraduate students are estimated to pay $1,034 for course materials each academic year. Said another way, students must work 142 hours at a minimum wage job to purchase their course materials each year. Thus, high course material costs directly impact first generation, food-insecure, and low-income students and their ability to do well in class.

Image created by IU Press

A national survey of over 2,000 students found that if students cannot afford course materials, 65% of them will avoid renting or buying texts even though they know it may possibly impact their overall success in a course. Almost half of the students surveyed said that the cost of textbooks also “impacted how many/ which classes they took each semester,” potentially affecting student course loads and degree progression (pg. 5).

Affordable and open course materials offer a potential solution to this issue. Affordable course materials are offered to students at a reduced price, often at a fraction of what they would normally pay. IU’s eText program has helped IU instructors integrate affordable course material into their classrooms since 2010. Students play a reduced, flat fee for their eTexts and they are guaranteed access on the first day of the semester, increasing engagement for the entire class. Students retain access to eTexts throughout their time as an IU student.

Similarly, Open Educational Resources (OER) are course materials that are shared under an intellectual property license that explicitly allows others to use and revise them freely. Examples of OER include textbooks, videos, activities, syllabi, and lectures shared under a Creative Commons license. In addition to cost savings, OER have been connected to student retention and completion. A study at Virginia State University found that students who took courses that utilized OER “tended to have higher grades and lower failing and withdrawal rates.” Thus, affordable and open course materials save students money while also helping instructors improve learning outcomes.

Still, many faculty do not know how to find, evaluate, or create affordable and open course material. The Office of Scholarly Publishing and UITS have partnered to hold a day-long Driving Student Success through Affordable Course Material Symposium on March 8, which will explore the connection between course material costs and student success, progression, and retention. The symposium will feature three experts on affordable course material from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Steel Wagstaff (Educational Technology Consultant), Kris Olds (Professor of Geography), and Carrie Nelson (Librarian and Director of Scholarly Communication) will share their experience locating, creating, assessing, and integrating OER and affordable course material into courses in several disciplines.

Morning workshops will explore tools and repositories for finding and creating affordable course materials firsthand. The afternoon panel will provide an overview of current initiatives at IU and UW-Madison and address how course material costs impact students in more depth. The day will conclude with an informal reception, where attendees can meet one-on-one with IU experts to get started on adopting or creating affordable course material in their own courses.

All IU Bloomington instructors interested in course material creation, new forms of pedagogy, and tools for finding and evaluating affordable/ open content are welcome! Space is limited and registration is required by February 16, as lunch is provided.

Instructors interested in working with the Office of Scholarly Publishing to find or create either OER or eTexts can e-mail iusw@indiana.edu.

This semester I had the privilege of teaching “Academic Editing and Publishing,” a one-credit hour course for the Indiana University Journal of Undergraduate Research (IUJUR) student editorial board. I co-taught the course with a current undergraduate student and the former editor-in-chief of IUJUR, Sonali Mali. The purpose of the course was twofold: to give students a practical skillset for publishing a multidisciplinary undergraduate scholarly journal at Indiana University while also informing students of larger conceptual academic publishing issues.

Striking a balance between practical fundamentals—for example, learning the ins and outs of our publishing platform and evaluating submissions using IUJUR-specific rubrics—with larger concepts was sometimes challenging. Overall, I think that students appreciated the authentic learning experiences that resulted from using an active journal as a tangible example throughout the course.

I learned a lot about myself as an instructor and the importance of librarian perspectives in undergraduate publishing education. Library publishers are experts in ethical publishing practices, open access funding, and various peer review models. Students were most passionate when we discussed the cost of information, open access publishing, and new publishing innovations, including post-publication peer review, data publishing, and including 3D and media in traditional journal publishing. I was excited to talk about these developments in the context of the work that IU Libraries is pursuing and several of the case studies we discussed in class were pulled from work that the Office of Scholarly Publishing (OSP) and IU Press is currently engaged in.

The Importance of Undergraduate Research

Throughout the course, I learned about the importance of undergraduate research and the integral role that IUJUR editors play as ambassadors for undergraduate research at Indiana University. I kicked off the first session of our course with asking students to articulate why undergraduate research was important. Students shared that IUJUR gave IU students a voice and presence on a research-intensive campus. They explained that an institutional commitment to undergraduate research provided space for all students to ask their own research questions and share their perspectives. They also noted that IUJUR gives student editors and authors access to faculty advisors, tangible career preparation, and opportunities to refine their voice and collaboration skills. Here were a few of my favorite responses from this activity:

These responses align with the growing body of literature that discusses how impactful and effective undergraduate research is. The Council on Undergraduate Research supports institutions of all sizes and missions that provide some kind of undergraduate research opportunity for faculty and students to collaborate on. They have a variety of publications, many of which are freely available to access. Some of the benefits of intensive undergraduate research that CUR has identified include:

Similarly, undergraduate research has been called a “high-impact practice” or HIP. George Kuh wrote a landmark paper for the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AACU) on high-impact educational practices in 2008. When researching why intensive undergraduate research, service learning, learning communities, and other learning opportunities were particularly effective, he found several similarities between HIPs (pgs. 14-17), including:

An extensive investment from students

Interaction and relationship building between peers and with faculty to solve “substantive” or real-world problems

Exposure to diverse perspectives and viewpoints

Consistent feedback to foster improvement and growth

Kuh’s list applies to the intensive work that IUJUR authors and editors do to publish a multidisciplinary journal regularly.

Throughout the course I always tried to come back to our first session and the reasons that students identified for why undergraduate research is important. I can now articulate that the product–the final research output that others can read and cite–is only a piece of the puzzle. The process that IUJUR student editors and authors go through is just as fundamental. The process is where learning takes place. It’s where we train future researchers, scholars, and citizens to think critically about access to research and how we evaluate scholarship. It’s where we build relationships with students that transform their future career paths and broaden and enhance their existing interests. I am thankful to play a small part in the IUJUR student editors’ process and be part of a campus that prioritizes undergraduate research.

Weiner, S., & Watkinson, C. (2014). What do students learn from participation in an undergraduate research journal? Results of an assessment. Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication, 2(2). http://doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.1125

We are happy to announce that two interns — Olivia Wikle and Alex Moon — will be joining our staff for the Spring 2018 semester.

Olivia has a background in digital humanities,
with a special interest in the intersection of literature and music in late eighteenth-century Britain. She will contribute to many of the different pieces that comprise the Scholarly Communication Department’s digital scholarship and publishing programs. Olivia received her M.A. in Musicology from The Ohio State University in 2016 and will complete her Master of Library Science with a specialization in Digital Humanities at Indiana University in May 2018. Olivia also serves as Treasurer of the American Library Association Student Chapter at IU.

Alex Moon will employ his considerable expertise and a diverse skillset to improve our assessment and analytics efforts. He is a second year masters student in the Higher Education and Student Affairs program at the IU School Education. Alex has a background in English literature and dance, and is looking forward to pursuing an additional masters degree in Library and Information Science next year.

We are fortunate to have them aboard. Look for posts later in the semester reporting on their contributions to the work of the Department. Please contact us by email (iusw at indiana dot edu) if you are interested in a future internship with Scholarly Communication.